Taste Notes

Measured 10 SRM usg BJCP color chart...this Munich Dunkel....was pushed over the alchohol limit (on purpose) but the malts are complex enough that you can't detect it. Malts are complex with strong Munich flavors and no detection of the rice in the balance, but the Mason Jar malt added a distinctive "green malt" flavor that rounds with a slighly acrid ending. It's unusual, but unexpectedly nice although it took the Gelatin to bring out the astringency from early tasting. Might have given it a higher rating except the high Alcohol and unique anerobic malt taste are not to style.

Notes

Mashed out with compression......going to need Gelatin Clarification to reduce tannins. This one brewed "Gold Star"
Used a BIB / two pot (both heated) continuously recirculating method today......first as a "step mash" starting at 122F (solar hot water temp at 9:30 AM on a sunny day) then raising all the grains to a couple of step temps then to 170F mash out (all within a total time of a 90 minute mash, with 60 of those minutes inside the saccrifician zone) (20 below that for protein rest and 10 over for mash-out). I accelerated it slightly from 142-156 to get to the higher temperature hopefully about half way through the conversion to sugars. I don't have a target FG so basically following a profile that seems theoretically good and matches my equipment's capacity for controllable heating rates.
I had a large grain bag in each pot....suspended over a rack/false bottom, and at the end of the mashout, I moved one of these bags, after minimally draining it, to the lower pot and put a plastic 5 gallon lid inside the pot on top of the grain bags, while still recircualting, and on top of that a cube filled up with hot water (for mass weight). This automatically compressed the grains and I slowly cut back the draining top pot until it was full and clear and started the wort boil from there. As the grains drained under compression, I pumped the remaining wort to the top pot. Think like a giant Cuban pressed coffee machine. The advantage of continuing to circulate during this time is that now you are mashing through a compressed grain bed and it filters really well and takes out the fine particles usually found in typical BIB when you squeeze out the bag which is one of the main reasons to be critical of BIB.
Amazingly, I started with 13 pounds of grain, and in the end, the grain bags weighted 18 pounds pressed out....that means only 5 pounds of water left in the grain (5/8th of a gallon). I ended up with 6.8 gallons of 1.058 wort. (post boil). (I started with 8 gallons of water, so that means a little less than a gallon lost to evaporation during the mash/boil itself, 5/8th of a gallon absorbed by the grain)
Not only was it clean and easy, it was also my fastest 100% grain day yet....started at 9:30.....cubed and cleaned up by 1:30. And that's with a 90 minute boil and 90 minute mash. (An advantage of this technique is that your mash and boil time actually overlap taking place at the same time from when you stop draining the top pot to boil while the bottom pot continues to drain the grains